BioWare’s Hudson: Mass Effect 3 will still have mining

Mass Effect’s lead producer Casey Hudson has told Videogamer the mining mini-game that debuted in Mass Effect 2 will be kept for its sequel.

Speaking with the site in a post-mortem of the latest in the series, released back in January, he said that despite mixed feedback on it, which sees you scanning planets in the game for minerals and other stuff – which was essential if you needed to upgrade the Normandy – it will remain for Mass Effect 3.

When asked what would happen with it, he said: “No. Again, when you look at the feedback, there are things that people liked about it, and functionally it serves a purpose. I don’t think there’s a problem with any of those.

“I think it’s the way people relied on it, and the way we relied on it maybe too much in parts of the story. And also just when you think about the speed of it.”

On the feedback itself, he added: “The feedback we had prior to releasing the game was generally exactly that. It was like, ‘It’s strangely addictive. It’s kind of therapeutic’.

“But there were different personality types, too. And one of the personality types that we hadn’t encountered was there were a lot of people that when they know that they can go and get resources through something like that, they literally want to mine the entire galaxy that night.

Hudson revealed in the same interview that DLC for Mass Effect 2 will bridge the story gap between ME2 and Mass Effect 3, although it’ll be a while before they actually start talking about it properly.